Etica e Health Technology Assessment (HTA): sulle difficoltà della loro integrazione

Ethics has been identified as a key element in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) since its conception, meaning that examining ethical consequences – as well the health, economic, social-cultural and legal consequences –raised by the use of health technologies is a fundamental aim of this research field. Nevertheless, HTA rarely addresses ethics and ethical analyses have been rarely integrated explicitly in HTA reports. Many hypotheses have been provided to explain this lack. The article intends to discuss the hypothesis for which ethics is rarely integrated in HTA also and above all because of epistemological reasons.